The PCI Express™ interface protocol, as defined by the PCI Express Base Specification, Revision 1.0a(Apr. 15, 2003), is fast becoming a widely used standard across the computer industry as a high-speed data communication link. Although a PCI-Express™ link allows for a large amount of data to transfer between two devices quickly, there always exists the need for more data throughput. One way of increasing the data throughput, without increasing the number of lanes or the clock frequency of the interconnect, is to compress the data that is transferred. General data compression schemes are ubiquitous throughout the computer industry. These data compression schemes would compress the data payloads of PCI-Express™ packets, but the transactional overhead, such as addresses, reserved bit fields, and special characters are not compressed with a general data compression scheme.